Postmodern Warfare

This is not a good age for reasonable men. Rather it is an age best understood by a damaged brain, one corroded by the sacred smoke that sees all and understands all through the cracked and distorted lenses that are the gateway to what passes for reality in today’s world.

David Michael Green is such a reasonable man. This is why he expects that objectives, strategies and tactics should govern our Afghan enterprise. Unfortunately, cool, rational analysis is a blind alley leading nowhere.

There was a time, in a golden age long ago, when wars were fought like that. A nation went to war with a well defined objective in mind, be it land, resources or power. Out of this objective, it crafted a strategy that was followed by a specific set of tactics designed to achieve the objective.

Our postmodern warfare, on the other hand, is grounded on one simple premise: dying animals don’t think; they thrash. War is now a series of knee-jerk tactics that yield half-backed strategies designed to implement non-existent objectives.

Postmodern warfare is a mosh pit of head banging, thrashing and body surfing all writh to the warble of a ruptured accordion played by a blind eunuch. It is a nonlinear tangle of contradictory moves and countermoves with neither meaning nor beginning nor end. It is not fought to achieve victory but is fought to perpetuate itself infinitely into the future. This is why it is without objective. An objective could easily be achieved which would threaten our state of perpetual warfare by robbing it of its justification.

It’s not a war on terror; it’s not a “long war.” It’s the Eternal War of the Empty Policy.

Postmodern warfare is a child of habituated conditioning in a world where the brains of our leaders are encapsulated in their testicles and policy is reduced to determining whose is biggest. War is to a dying empire what Viagra is to an old man—a chance to get it off one more time.

Let our infrastructure crumble, our children go to bed hungry, our states sink in a sea of red ink, the homeless wander the streets of our hollowed out cities. None of this matters as long as the Beltway continues astride its militarized ego trip to the approving smiles of its corporate handlers as they continue to siphon public funds into their private pockets.

Green got one thing right when he said, “Yes, as a matter of fact, history’s lesson is correct—empires do die from within, not from external assault. Idiocy is more lethal than Huns.”

Lord Acton was wrong. Power doesn’t corrupt; it rots the brain. That is why we who are brain damaged understand it so well.